Demo/Tutorial App

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

One of the things I was hoping we could put into the GNOME 2.0 help system
was an application which would show demo and tutorial slideshows.  It
would be a generic application which reads an XML file and displays
screenshots along with text explaining them.  It would be usable by any
application.  It would allow us to write slideshows which either show off
an applications features for new users, or which teach users how to do
basic (or advanced?) things with the given application.

I discussed this idea on #docs with synap, who had many good ideas and was
already thinking about such an app.  When I mentioned the idea to
Jonathan, he decided to quickly put together a version which we could play
with.  (Thank you Jonathan!)  In an amazing burst of hacking, he quickly
produced a working version.  It is missing a few bells and whistles we
might want to have, but is a very strong start and will let us test out
some ideas.

I quickly threw together a demo of Gnumeric, although I don't really
know how to use it well - somebody else could write a much better
one.  Anyway, grab this tarball:

ftp://clack.uchicago.edu/pub/gnome/gnumeric_demo_test1.tgz

unpack it, and run ./gnome-tutor.py gnumeric_demo_test1.xml

Then come back and discuss your ideas on this list.  Some of the issues
which Jonathan and I have discussed but not decided on:

1) Layout - Do we want to use the GNOME Druid?  Do we want to use the
current page layout?  Basically we need to decide where to put the title,
if we want the little icon, if we want the blue bars on the top and side,
etc.  Aside from looking nice, we need to be careful about screen
real-estate.  This Gnumeric demo is big.  The screenshots are actually
smaller than what some apps or an overall GNOME demo would have.  How can
we make things look nice and fit on a person's monitor?

2) Scripting - Jonathan suggested we could script, such as showing a mouse
moving across the screen or text being typed.  Basically we would say show
a cursor moving from [x0,y0] to [x1,y1] at speed S. I think this would be
*really* cool. Opinions?

3) Movies - We could have short movies, such as just 3 or 4 frames which
slowly play.  This might be especially interesting in combination with the
scripting above, where you would show a mouse opening the Main Menu and
selecting an item for example.  Since it is just a few frames and the
motion is handled in the scripting, it would look similar to a live movie,
but would not take up a lot of drive space - and would be easier for us
doc writers to produce.

Dan